(11-17-2016, 03:49 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Trickle down and free market are pretty much opposites, and I don't think Obama's massive government trickle down stimulus spending strategy has triumphed quite yet.
Free markets are a pipe dream. We are likely to have a government that sees its sole purpose in enforcing the will of economic elites while making sure that the only 'free market' is a competitive race to the bottom by non-elites. Whoever suffers the most on behalf of the elites gets the privilege of survival.
Quote:Marxist type revolution is a workers' revolution, so one could possibly see Trump's victory as a mild form of that.
Trump has more in common with Mussolini -- pretension of standing for a revolution for all that proves a fraud for the workers. He has shown by his appointments what he really stands for -- a pure plutocracy.
He does have one thing in common with Marxists -- the observation that the capitalist order is by necessity a cruel, corrupt, inequitable, repressive, dehumanizing system. The late Fidel Castro also believed that, as does every Marxist-Leninist. The difference between Donald Trump and Fidel Castro is that Donald Trump lauds what Fidel Castro excoriates. Add to that, Donald Trump and Fidel Castro both reduce political discourse to a level suitable for people with elementary-level education, which makes for numbing propaganda at the intellectual level of Beavis and Butthead cartoons.
As someone who can accept a humanized capitalism for its efficiency and its ability to reward human kindness instead of simply rewarding people for their wealth and power, I do not need to be a Marxist. I may have more-than-average knowledge of Marx (I have read Das Kapital and recognize its faults, including obsolescence in the modern consumer economy that has turned the proletariat into a mass market), Donald Trump and his cronies compel me to contemplate what it would take for me to connect to Marxism.
One would be the repudiation by economic elites of the consumer society. An economic order that restores the horrors of the early industrial society that Karl Marx knew with a political system that permanently enshrines a Master Class as the political bosses beyond any challenge might take away such alternatives as liberal humanism.
Marxism may appeal to the oppressed and downtrodden, but the oppressed and downtrodden generally don't get the luxury of reading Marx and his followers. One cannot understand modern economics, including the rejection of Marxism-Leninism, without understanding Marx.
It's the educated people who cannot accept roles as brutal enforcers of capitalist cruelty who become the intellectual exponents of Marx.
Quote:Violent revolution might be more likely to come from the welfare dependent class that was created with LBJ's "Great Society", if their benefits are taken away, and if they prefer revolution to finding work. That class did not exist in Marx's day, of course.
Violent revolution by welfare recipients suddenly obliged to work or starve? Most will get to do both. Revolution means getting mowed down if one is on the wrong side. Poor people don't start revolutions; frustrated members of the educated class do. Alienated intellectuals are dangerous to any political order... even ours.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.